stuffing with common bitumen or asphaltum, and discolouring in various ways, they contrived to palm off as genuine mummies from the banks of the Nile.
This discovery was the death-blow of the trade. Thenceforth people turned in disgust from mummy-powder, and I believe it would be quite in vain to seek for it in any modern pharmacopœia.
So strange an episode in medical history may suggest to us one or two as strange reflections.
The first that occurs to me is, “How curiously people are sometimes revenged!”
When mummies were medicine the trades of apothecary and importing merchant were chiefly in the hands of Jews. Consider now the possibility of a hard-hearted Pharaoh, three or four thousand years ago, having insisted on the poor down-trodden children of Israel building him an enormous pyramid in some preposterously short space of time. The poor strawless brick-makers and bricklayers groan under the rod of the oppressor, and labour at their task. The weak bows down before the strong, and the suffering cry of “How long?” seems to have been lifted up in vain.
The Pharaoh goes down to his tomb, and the oppressed go to their long homes, also. To the just and to the unjust there is one common end. But the years roll on unceasingly. Generation follows generation; century after century is swallowed up of time. Israel has been lifted up and brought low again. Once more he groans under the yoke of the stranger. The glory of his own land has departed, and he is scattered abroad amongst the people that scorn and despise him. Even yet in this, his low estate, there is reserved for him a refinement of revenge that is calculated to satisfy even a nation of Shylocks! He takes the old Pharaoh who ground down the faces of his father ; takes him from out his stately tomb, beats him with mortar and pestle into a fine powder, and sells him out across the counter at so much an ounce to the extortionate Christian whom he most hates and detests! There is something more than mere revenge in Nemesis turned apothecary. Consider how curiously these Egyptian worthies might be distributed, which is, of course, only a consideration arising out of my last reflection on their being distributed at all.
Two drams of Sesostris to cure the pork-butcher's little daughter of the whooping-cough!
Half-an-ounce of Sesostris's valet for the relief of His Majesty King John's rheumatism!
An occasional pinch of an Egyptian tom cat from Sebaste for the good of old General Fugleman's eye-sight !
When our forefathers absorbed Egyptian bodies into their own, must they not necessarily have become in some degree Egyptianised ? You may tell me “No,” and that a man by eating beef never shows any tendency to become an ox—still the doubt will return. And when I stand in the Sydenham Palace and look up at those colossal figures of Oimenepthah II., and Amunothph III. (whose name any one may pronounce who can), is it not natural that I should feel a yearning towards them? Why should I not cry “Oh, Oimenepthah II., Oh, Amunothph III., can it be that my ancestors actually devoured thee in the shape of drugs, and that I, through their cannibalism, am in some fractional degree, bone of thy bone, flesh of thy flesh, balsam of thy balsam?"
Did Mr. Buckle properly consider all this when he wrote that admirable book in which he teaches us how greatly our mental, moral, and intellectual eminence depends on the state of the weather, and the quality of our victuals? I am afraid he did not; and as the omission must have been accidental, he is at liberty to insert in his next edition any reflections which may be suggested by this paper. If, as we are so clearly taught, the comparative perfection of the soul depends on the comparative perfection of the body; and if the physical organisation of an Egyptian be so far inferior to that of an European that only the diseased imagination of the lover can “see Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt; ”—it follows, practically and incontrovertibly, that Europe must deteriorate in exactly the same proportion as it assimilates itself to Egypt.
Following out carefully this train of reasoning, my readers must admit that the inadequate manner in which I have brought this subject before them may be chargeable not so much on me as on Oimenepthah II., or Amunothph III. R. H.
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